The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency, #2)

by John Scalzi

“And yet this one is a lord and his father a count.” “You’re expecting logic from royal titles?” “Point.”

“I have some people here who would very much like to do that to me,” Grayland said. “Overthrow me, I mean.” “I would recommend against it,” Chenevert advised. “Not a great career move?” “It frees up your schedule, which is honestly fantastic. But the people who removed you then usually want to kill you too. And that’s inconvenient.

“The Memory Room is not memory,” Rachela said. “It is a means of preserving memory. A library is not information; it is a means of preserving information. In every case before memory or information can be stored, someone has to decide what must be stored. Someone must choose. Someone must curate.”

hiding the past never works as well as simply neglecting it.”

I’m barely even a lord. I’m a lord on a technicality.”

By now Marce was aware he was falling more than a little bit in love with Cardenia, not because she was the emperox (that part sort of scared the crap out of him, in point of fact) but because they were awkward in complementary ways.

Kiva had liked Marce, who had been a solid if not especially imaginative lover and a decent human being in a universe that didn’t put a premium on that.

The calculus was not in her favor; Kiva decided to get a drink to see if that would change any variables.

“I was just talking about you,” Cardenia said, coming up to him. “To your imaginary friends, I see.” “They’re not imaginary. They’re just not real.”

“I like it when you use human languages,” Cardenia said. “They’re my second-favorite type of languages.”